Patrick Roland Cullinan (1932-) is a South African poet and biographer. He was born into a significant diamond-mining family in Pretoria, and attended Charterhouse School and Oxford University in England (where he read Italian and Russian) before returning to South Africa, where he worked as a sawmill owner in the Eastern Transvaal. With Lionel Abrahams, he founded the literary journal The Bloody Horse : Writings and the Arts in 1980 and the Bateleur Press. Through the journal (the title taken from a poem by Roy Campbell) Cullinan sought to re-establish the standing of poetry in South Africa. Cullinan's poetry collections include The Horizon Forty Miles Away (1973), Today Is Not Different (1978), The White Hail in the Orchard (1984) and Selected Poems 1961 - 1991 (1992). The volume The White Hail in the Orchard contains what Cullinan calls 'versions' by which he means loose translations from the Italian poetry of Eugenio Montale. For this latter endeavour, he was given the title of cavaliere by the Italian government. Cullinan accepted the fact that writers ought to have been involved in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, while acknowledging the fact that is it difficult to produce a satisfactory political poem. Cullinan taught for many years at the University of the Western Cape. He has also published a biography of Robert Jacob Gordon (a Dutch traveller and soldier) : Robert Jacob Gordon 1743 - 1795 : The Man and His Travels at the Cape (1992)and a collections of the letters of Bessie Head. Cullinan has won significant recognition in South Africa, and enjoys a reputation as perhaps the most prominent South African poet alive today. His poems are carefully crafted, often lyrical, and at one with the tradition of Yeats. They do not contain political messages (seen by some as unusual in a period of political turbulence in which writers were expected to contribute to the struggle against apartheid); instead, their value is in their poetic beauty. Cullinan has made a significant contribution to South African poetry through his encouragement of young writers, both through his teaching, and through his willingness to mentor, support and constructively criticise. During his Oxford period, he was similarly mentored by John Betjeman, and so represents a unique link between a lyrical English verse tradition and the many young English-speaking South African poets.
External links
Amazon.co.uk : Imaginative Trespasser : Letters Between Bessie Head, Patrick and Wendy Cullinan 1963 - 1977
Review and description of Selected Poems [2]
